“Seven employees were dead, with more than 20 wounded, their blood on the walls that had not blown apart. And under a caved-in roof lay tens of thousands of charred books and printing machinery in smoldering heaps. … ‘The attack felt methodical and deliberate, like cultural genocide.’” - NPR
"If a list so devoid of representation from small presses, working class writers, genre-fiction, and poetry is aggregated with contributions from ‘hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians and other literary luminaries,’ what does that say about ... American readership?” - Scroll (India)
“Part of trying to get on quietly and diplomatically in life and not clash with people is keeping up the pretence that fuckwits don’t walk among us in the world, but sometimes you just have to face up to the reality of the situation: Fuckwits do walk among us in the world.” - The Villager
Orlaine McDonald, author of No Small Thing: "I’m a painfully slow writer and can find it really hard to commit anything to the page without wanting to immediately revise and refine.”- The Guardian (UK)
Most unfortunately for young Floridians, this particular Florida man is also the state’s Commissioner of Education. “In Diaz’s defense, ‘freedom’ does appear four times , and there are a number of discussions of shooting guns.” - LitHub
Among publishers, editors, scholars, critics, and even writers themselves, the stories we tell about literature are more and more stories of the economy of prestige, of one generation’s preferences righteously overturning those of its predecessors. - Granta
"Why doesn’t Solzhenitsyn’s catalogue of horrors grow boring? You read three volumes about boots trampling on human faces and your attention never flags. One reason is that Solzhenitsyn is a master of ironic narration. … But the nature of Solzhenitsyn’s 'experiment in literary investigation' explains why this book remains riveting." - The New Criterion
Kachka was one of the 115 staffers (roughly 20% of the newsroom) at the Los Angeles Times who were made redundant in January. Before going to California in 2020, he was the books editor at New York magazine, where he was a contributing editor for 14 years. - Publishers Weekly
"For much of its history, the Western sports novel had been the stuff of inspirational boys’ tales, full of moral instruction and can’t-lose heroes. … But the twenty-first century, and specifically the past decade, have served as an even richer terrain for the literature of athletics." - Esquire
The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. - The Guardian
With public libraries mandated to support literacy, recreational reading, and free access to information, today’s librarians make decisions about removing books amid competing pressures on their spaces and budgets. - The Conversation
"A potential deal would separate its media assets from its digital classifieds operation, handing the former to CEO Mathias Doepfner and the founder's widow Friede Springer, and the latter to KKR and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board." - Reuters
Author Sally Franson says that if you want belly laughs, you might have to go through some painful experiences first. “The harder I laughed or the harder I cried, the more people laughed. And it wasn’t malicious, you know, it was like, I see you. That is so human.” - Slate
Dinaw Mengestu, on his character Samuel: “There’s a limitation to how fully we can truly understand his experiences. ... That gap becomes part of the narrative, part of what the story is trying to deeply engage with.” - The New York Times
C. Pam Zhang: “It’s fascinating to see that there’s no linear relationship between input and output when it comes to creativity. For me, it feels like there’s a vein you tap into sometimes if you’re lucky.” - The Guardian (UK)
